How have you decided how to approach God’s Word this year?
I was thinking recently about the relationship we form with the Bible over time: Close and personal? Hurried? Obligatory? Sporadic?
Any relationship takes time and attention. When we are genuinely interested in getting to know someone, at some point we’ll hear about their background, how they were raised, the primary things that formed who they are now. The same with ourselves. There are people in life to whom we want to be known.
And it isn’t just information we desire—it’s knowledge about another human being that leads to the pleasure of common experience, or the fascination of vastly different experiences. It is the joy of a deeply developing friendship.
This has been my experience with the One Year Bible (not chronologically, but in 365 daily readings) and why I enjoy sharing what I’m thinking about as I move through its pages.
I hope you’ve made a plan as to how you will maintain your relationship with God’s Word this year. There are obviously a multitude of choices—in addition to the OYB, I also recommend the YouVersion app, where you can make your own reading plan, or choose from a wealth of plans. And, of course, there are many other resources.
The primary importance, in my opinion, in addition to the rich blessing of reading the Scriptures with an open heart, is a growing knowledge of the arc of the whole. Time spent in the Word continually adds to our understanding of the story behind the story: that, after the Fall, God is at work setting things right. The vast multitude of parts of human history reveal the whole of God’s marvelous plan to save His wayward creation.
If you haven’t yet made a plan, may I encourage you not to delay? C.S. Lewis writes in Reflections on the Psalms:
When we carry out our ‘religious duties’ we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last the water comes, it may find them ready. . .There are happy moments, even now, when a trickle creeps along the dry beds; and happy souls to whom this happens often.
Every time we sit and open the Word, we are digging another channel for God to fill, in His moment, with joy, with comfort, with fresh revelation. That is my prayer for you, my dear readers, in this new year.
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